Privacy Policy

You are free to explore the Websites without providing any Personal Information about yourself. When you visit the Websites or ask for information, we request that you provide Personal Information about yourself, and we collect Navigational Information. When you apply for our services or employment, we may ask you to share Sensitive Information that is necessary for the registration process.

This refers to any information that you voluntarily submit to us and that identifies you personally, including contact information, such as your name, email address, company name, address, phone number, and other information about yourself. Personal Information can also include information about any transactions, both free and paid, that you enter into on the Websites, and information about you that is available on the internet, such as from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google, or publicly available information that we acquire from service providers.

This refers to information about your computer and your visits to this Website such as your IP address, geographical location, browser type, referral source, length of visit, and pages viewed. Please see the “Navigation Information” section below.

When you use our services to view content provided by us, we automatically collect information about your computer hardware and software. This information can include your IP address, browser type, domain names, internet service provider (ISP), the files viewed on our site (e.g., HTML pages, graphics, etc.), operating system, clickstream data, access times, and referring website addresses. This information is used by EXPLO to provide general statistics regarding the use of the EXPLO Website. For these purposes, we do link this automatically-collected data to Personal Information such as name, email address, address, and phone number.

This refers to credit or debit card numbers, personal financial account information, Social Security numbers, passport numbers, driver’s license numbers or similar personal identifiers, racial or ethnic origin, physical or mental health condition or information, or other employment, financial, or health information.

When you register with EXPLO, your information is stored in a secure server environment and is protected behind a firewall. The information that is transmitted back and forth is scrambled with the aid of encryption technology. Because of this, we require that your browser be capable of supporting 256-bit encryption. When you are accessing pages on the Website, you can tell if you are in a secure area by looking for the “padlock” symbol at the bottom of your browser window.

We collect and process payment information from you when you purchase services from EXPLO, including credit card numbers and billing information, using third-party PCI-compliant service providers.

In addition to the uses identified elsewhere in this Privacy Policy, we may use your Personal Information to:

• improve your browsing experience by personalizing the Websites;
• send information or EXPLO content that we think may be of interest to you by post, email, or other means and send you marketing communications relating to our business;
• promote the use of our services to you and share promotional and information content with you in accordance with your communication preferences;
• provide other companies with statistical information about our users — but this information will not be used to identify any individual user;
• send information to you regarding changes to our Customer Terms of Service, Privacy Policy (including the Cookie Policy), or other legal agreements; and
• meet legal requirements.

We may, from time to time, contact you on behalf of external business partners about a particular offering that may be of interest to you. In those cases, we do not transfer your Personal Information to a third party.

In addition, we may share data with trusted partners to contact you based on your request to receive such communications, help us perform statistical analysis, or provide customer support. Such third parties are prohibited from using your Personal Information except for these purposes, and they are required to maintain the confidentiality of your information. If you do not want us to share your personal information with these companies, contact us at privacy@explo.org.

If you are a visitor/customer located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”), EXPLO is the data controller of your personal information. EXPLO’s Data Protection Officer can be contacted at privacy@explo.org. Our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it. However, we will normally collect personal information from you only where we have your consent to do so, where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you, or where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your data protection interests or fundamental rights and freedoms. In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you.

If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as of the possible consequences if you do not provide your personal information). Similarly, if we collect and use your personal information in reliance on our legitimate interests (or those of any third party), we will make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.

We use Navigational Information to operate and improve the Websites. We may also use Navigational Information alone or in combination with Personal Information to provide you with personalized information about EXPLO.

We post customer testimonials and comments on our Websites, which may contain Personal Information. We obtain each customer’s consent via email prior to posting the customer’s name and testimonial.

If you give us credit card information, we use it solely to check your financial qualifications and collect payment from you. We use a third-party service provider to manage credit card processing. This service provider is not permitted to store, retain, or use information you provide except for the sole purpose of credit card processing on our behalf.

We employ other companies and people to provide services to visitors to our Websites and our customers and may need to share your information with them to provide information, products, or services to you. Examples may include removing repetitive information from prospect lists, analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, processing credit card payments, managing health care data for enrolled students, supplementing the information you provide us in order to provide you with better service, and providing customer service. In all cases where we share your information with such agents, we explicitly require the agent to acknowledge and adhere to our privacy and customer data handling policies.

We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your Personal Information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. We secure the Personal Information you provide on computer servers in a controlled, secure environment, protected from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. All Personal Information is protected using appropriate physical, technical, and organizational measures.

Our Websites include Social Media Features, such as the Facebook Like button and Widgets, such as the Share This button or interactive mini-programs that run on our sites. These features may collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our sites, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social Media Features and Widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our Websites. This Privacy Policy does not apply to these features. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy and other policies of the companies providing them.

We offer publicly accessible message boards, blogs, and community forums. Please keep in mind that if you directly disclose any information through our public message boards, blogs, or forums, this information may be collected and used by others. We will correct or delete any information you have posted on the Websites if you so request, as described in “Opting Out and Unsubscribing” below.

We retain Personal Information that you provide us as long as we consider it potentially useful in contacting you about EXPLO services, or as needed to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements, and then we securely delete the information. We will delete this information from the servers at an earlier date if you so request, as described in “Opting Out and Unsubscribing” below.

To facilitate our global operations, we may transfer and access Personal Information from around the world, including the United States. This Privacy Policy shall apply even if we transfer Personal Information to other countries.

EXPLO participates in and has certified its compliance with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework and the Swiss–U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. EXPLO is committed to subjecting all personal data received from European Union (EU) member countries and Switzerland, in reliance on the Privacy Shield Framework, to the Framework’s applicable Principles. To learn more about the Privacy Shield Framework, visit the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Privacy Shield List.

EXPLO is responsible for the processing of personal data it receives under the Privacy Shield Framework and subsequently transfers to a third party acting as an agent on its behalf. EXPLO complies with the Privacy Shield Principles for all onward transfers of personal data from the EU and Switzerland.

With respect to personal data received or transferred pursuant to the Privacy Shield Framework, EXPLO is subject to the regulatory enforcement powers of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In certain situations, EXPLO may be required to disclose personal data in response to lawful requests by public authorities, including meeting national security or law enforcement requirements.

You may direct any inquiries or complaints related to our Privacy Shield compliance to privacy@explo.org.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at privacy@explo.org or by mail to EXPLO, The Exploration Center, 932 Washington Street, Norwood, MA 02062 USA, Attention: Privacy. We will respond to your request to change, correct, or delete your information within a reasonable timeframe and notify you of the action we have taken.

You may unsubscribe from our marketing communications by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link located on the bottom of our emails, updating your communication preferences, sending us an email at privacy@explo.org, or by sending us postal mail to EXPLO, The Exploration Center, 932 Washington Street, Norwood, MA 02062 USA, Attention: Privacy. Customers cannot opt-out of receiving transactional emails related to their account with us.

EXPLO

The Exploration Center
932 Washington Street
Norwood, MA 02062, USA

A cookie is a small file containing a string of characters that is sent to your computer when you visit a website. When you visit the site again, the cookie allows that site to recognize your browser. Cookies may store user preferences and other information.

Cookies provide a convenience feature to save you time or tell the Web server that you have returned to a specific page. For example, if you personalize pages on our Websites, or register for the Subscription Service, a cookie helps us to recall your specific information on subsequent visits. When you return to the same Website, the information you previously provided can be retrieved, so you can easily use the customized features.

Cookies set by the website owner (in this case, EXPLO) are called “first party cookies”. Cookies set by parties other than the website owner are called “third-party cookies”. Third-party cookies enable third-party features or functionality to be provided on or through the website (e.g. like advertising, interactive content, and analytics). The parties that set these third-party cookies can recognize your computer both when it visits the website in question and also when it visits certain other websites.

We use first-party and third-party cookies for several reasons. Some cookies are required for technical reasons in order for our Websites to operate, and we refer to these as “essential” or “strictly necessary” cookies. Other cookies also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our Websites. For example, EXPLO keeps track of the Websites and pages you visit within EXPLO, in order to determine what portion of the EXPLO Website is the most popular or most used. This data is used to deliver customized content and promotions within the EXPLO Website to customers whose behavior indicates that they are interested in a particular subject area. Third parties serve cookies through our Websites for analytics and other purposes. This is described in more detail below.

The specific types of first and third-party cookies served through our Websites and the purposes they perform. These cookies include:

• Essential website cookies: These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our Websites and to use some of its features, such as access to secure areas.
• Performance and functionality cookies: These cookies are used to enhance the performance and functionality of our Websites, but are non-essential to their use. However, without these cookies, certain functionality may become unavailable.
• Analytics and customization cookies: These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our Websites are being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our Websites for you.
• Social networking cookies: These cookies are used to enable you to share pages and content that you find interesting on our Websites, Subscription Services, or Mobile Apps through third-party social networking and other websites. These cookies may also be used for advertising purposes too.

You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject cookies. You can exercise your cookie preferences by clicking on the appropriate opt-out links provided below.

You can set or amend your web browser controls to accept or refuse cookies. If you choose to reject cookies, you may still use our website, though your access to some functionality and areas of our website may be restricted. As the means by which you can refuse cookies through your web browser controls vary from browser to browser, you should visit your browser’s help menu for more information.

Essential website cookies: Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the Websites to you, you cannot refuse them. You can block or delete them by changing your browser settings, however, as described above.

Cookies are not the only way to recognize or track visitors to a website. We employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons/Web Bugs), which helps us better manage the Website by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages or in emails and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We use clear gifs or pixels in our HTML-based emails to let us know which emails have been opened by recipients. This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of certain communications and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. We tie the information gathered by clear gifs in emails to our customers’ Personal Information.

We may update this Cookie Policy from time to time in order to reflect, for example, changes to the cookies we use or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. Please, therefore, re-visit this Cookie Policy regularly to stay informed about our use of cookies and related technologies.

The date at the top of this Cookie Policy indicates when it was last updated.

If you have any questions about our use of cookies or other technologies, please email us at privacy@explo.org.

Address

EXPLO
The Exploration Center
Attn: Privacy
932 Washington Street
Norwood, MA 02062, USA

Email

privacy@explo.org